Kettle Cooking

Each fall, my parents and their friends do kettle cooking. This post contains some pictures from this years kettle cooking day, which was this past Sunday. They aren't in any particular order, so bare with my disorganized narration. The day is long, it begins at 6 in the morning and ends at about 6:30 in the evening. The day is also a lot of work for those involved. There are tomatoes, peppers, and onions to be chopped for the salsa. Carrots, meat, potatoes, tomatoes, cabbage, and several other veggies are sliced for the soup. Apples are peeled, cored and sliced for the applesauce. The end result is worth it, a lot of yummy food and an enjoyable day spent with friends and family.

Here the applesauce has come off the kettle and is being divided into containers for freezing. They have been doing this for several years, and have an assembly line type system that works perfectly.

The ladies hard at work slicing apples. They had a lot of pesky company this year, several bees were out an about.

And peeling apples. The apple corer/peeler/slicers come in very handy for this job.

Stirring the kettle of soup. Each of the kettles is this large, did I mention that a lot of food is made on this day?

Prepping potatoes for the soup.

This year was Madelynn's first kettle cooking experience. She enjoyed watching what was going on and playing with Ella, Julie Brinker now Kirbach's daughter. It was a relatively nice day, so she was able to spend alot of it outside under the awning of the shed.



And some inside, bouncing in her jumperoo.

The day concludes with everyone sampling the fruits of their labor. We ate the soup and all the other goodies people brought to snack on, including homemade apple dumplings topped with hand cranked ice cream. A perfect ending to a perfect day.

Editors Note: We will be on vacation next week, and we are supposed to have computer access in our cabin. If we do, I am hoping to give a couple updates on the blog while we are gone.